Week 8: Learning through doing

At this point, I am convinced that there is no HTML editor out there that gets it right all of the time. I agree that What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWIG) editors such as MS Front Page and Macromedia Dreamweaver allow you to create a lot more code more efficiently that you would be able to do if you were just hand-coding. BUT - the cose they create isn't always correct or the most efficient code possible.

The most common place where I find that HTML generaters fail is in the creation of links. I usually want to use a relative link - something like "myfile.html" - which means that the file targeted by a link set up that way will simply look in the same directory as the file containing the link. HTML editors frequently use absolute links - such as "/websitecode/thissite/myfile.html". This becomes a problem when you relocate the code - you have to go into the code and change all of the absolute links.

The tables created by HTML generators are frequently a bit more complex than they really need to be.

Also, style elements are usally coded "in-line" by code gemerators, rather than using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to easily provide a consistant easily-modifiable style for the entire site.

The moral of the story is TEST TEST TEST - try out the code on your development system, then try it out again on the sserver where it will be permanently hosted. Be ready to re-code some code sections by hand if necessary to produce more effective code.